Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
Consider n random intervals I 1, …, I N chosen by selecting endpoints independently from the uniform distribution. A packing of I 1, …, I N is a disjoint sub-collection of these intervals: its wasted space is the measure of the set of points not covered by the packing. We investigate the random variable W N equal to the smallest wasted space among all packings. Coffman, Poonen and Winkler proved that EW N is of order (log N)2/N. We provide a sharp estimate of log P(W N ≥ t (log N)2 / N) and log P(W N ≤ t (log N)2 / N) for all values of t.
Research supported in part by NSF contract DMS-9303188.